Did you know you can use an Atmel ATtiny45 or ATtiny85 microcontroller with Arduino software? Well you do now. The team at the High-Low Tech Group at MIT have published the information and examples on how to do this, and it looked like fun – so the purpose of this article is to document my experience with the ATtiny and Arduino and share the instructions with you in my own words. All credit goes to the interesting people at the MIT HLT Group for their article and of course to Alessandro Saporetti for his work on making all this possible.

Introduction

Before anyone gets too excited – there are a few limitations to doing this…

Limitation one – the ATtiny has “tiny” in the name for a reason:

it’s the one on the left

Therefore we have less I/O pins to play with. Consider the pinout for the ATtiny from the data sheet:

So as you can see we have thee analogue inputs (pins 7, 3 and 2) and two digital outputs with PWM (pins 5 and 6). Pin 4 is GND, and pin 8 is 5V.

Limitation two – memory. The ATtiny45 has 4096 bytes of flash memory available, the -85 has 8192. So you may not be controlling your home-built R2D2 with it.

Limitation three – available Arduino functions. As stated by the HLT article, the following commands are supported:

Limitation four – You need Arduino IDE v1.0.1 or higher, except for v1.0.2. So v1.0.3 and higher is fine.

So please keep these limitations in mind when planning your ATtiny project.

Getting Started

You can use an existing Arduino-compatible board as a programmer with some external wiring. Before wiring it all up – plug in your Arduino board, load the IDE and upload the ArduinoISP sketch which is in the File>Examples menu. Whenever you want to upload a sketch to your ATtiny, you need to upload the ArduinoISP sketch to your Arduino first. Consider this sketch the “bridge” between the IDE and the ATtiny.

Next, build the circuit as shown below:

Depending on the Arduino board you’re using, you may or may not need the 10uF capacitor between Arduino RST and GND. Follow the schematic above each time you want to program the ATtiny.

Software

From a software perspective, to use the ATtinys you need to add some files to your Arduino IDE. First, download this zip file. Then extract the”attiny” folder and copy it to the “hardware” folder which sits under your main Arduino IDE folder, for example:

Now restart the Arduino IDE. As you’re using the Arduino as a programmer, you need select “Arduino as ISP” – which is found in the Tools>Programmermenu. Next – select the board type using the Tools>Board menu. Select the appropriate ATtiny that you’re using – with the 1 MHz internal clock option. Now you can enter and upload your ATtiny sketch. When uploading sketches you may see error messages as shown below:

The message is “normal” in this situation, so nothing to worry about.

Creating Arduino sketches for ATtinys

When creating your sketches, note that the pin number allocations are different for ATtinys in the IDE. Note the following pin number allocations:

digital pin zero is physical pin five (also PWM)

digital pin one is physical pin six (also PWM)

analogue input two is physical pin seven

analogue input three is physical pin two

analogue input four is physical pin three

For a quick demonstration, load the Blink example sketch – File>Examples>1. Basics>Blink. Change the pin number for the digital output from 13 to 0. For example:

Arduino

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voidsetup()

{

pinMode(0,OUTPUT);

}

voidloop(){

digitalWrite(0,HIGH);// set the LED on

delay(1000);// wait for a second

digitalWrite(0,LOW);// set the LED off

delay(1000);// wait for a second

}

Upload the sketch using the methods described earlier. If you’re using programmer method one, your matching circuit is:

If you’re using programmer method two, this will blink the on-board LED.

Final example

We test the digital outputs with digital and PWM outputs using two LEDs instead of one:

And the sketch:

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voidsetup()

{

pinMode(0,OUTPUT);

pinMode(1,OUTPUT);

}

voidloop()

{

for(inta=0;a<6;a++)

{

digitalWrite(0,HIGH);// set the LED on

digitalWrite(1,LOW);// set the LED off

delay(1000);// wait for a second

digitalWrite(0,LOW);// set the LED off

digitalWrite(1,HIGH);// set the LED on

delay(1000);// wait for a second

}

for(intz=0;z<3;z++)

{

for(inta=0;a<256;a++)

{

analogWrite(0,a);

analogWrite(1,a);

delay(1);

}

for(inta=255;a>=0;--a)

{

analogWrite(0,a);

analogWrite(1,a);

delay(1);

}

}

}

And a quick demonstration video:

So there you have it – another interesting derivative of the Arduino system. Once again, thanks and credit to Alesssandro Saporetti and the MIT HLT Group for their published information. And if you enjoyed this article, or want to introduce someone else to the interesting world of Arduino – check out my book “Arduino Workshop”.

Have fun and keep checking into tronixstuff.com. Why not follow things on twitter, Google+, subscribe for email updates or RSS using the links on the right-hand column, or join our forum – dedicated to the projects and related items on this website.

Time yet again for another kit review. Today’s kit is the Larson Scanner from Evil Mad Science. What a different name for a company; their byline is “DIY and open source hardware for art, education and world domination”. Art? Yes. Education? Definitely. World domination? Possibly – you could use the blinking LEDs to hypnotise the less intelligent world leaders out there.

Anyhow, what is a Larson Scanner? Named in honour of Glen A. Larson the creator of television shows such as Battlestar Galactica and Knight Rider – as this kit recreates the left and right blinking motion used in props from those television shows. For example:

The kit itself is quite inexpensive, easy to assemble – yet can be as complex as you want it to be. More about that later, for now let’s put one together and see how it performs. There are two versions of the kit, one with 5mm clear LEDs and our review model with 10mm diffused red LEDs. The kit arrives inside a huge resealable anti-static bag, as such:

Upon opening the bag we have the following parts (there was an extra LED and resistor, thanks):

… the PCB:

… which is nicely done with a good silk-screen and solder mask. And finally:

A very handy item – a battery box with power switch. The kit is powered by 2 x AA cells (not included!). And finally, the instructions:

At this point you can see that this kit is designed for the beginner in mind. The instructions are easy to read, clear, and actually very well done. If you are looking for a kit to get someone interested in electronics and to practice their soldering, you could do a lot worse than use this kit. Construction was very easy, starting with the resistors:

followed by the capacitor and button:

then the microcontroller:

… no IC socket. For a beginners’ kit, perhaps one should have been included. Next was the battery box. Some clever thinking has seen holes in the PCB to run the wires through before soldering into the board – doing so provides a good strain relief for them:

… and finally the LEDs. Beginners may solder them in one at a time:

however it is quicker to line them up all at once than solder in one batch:

… which leaves us with the final product:

Operation is very simple – the power switch is on the battery box. The button on the PCB controls the speed of LED scrolling, and if held down switches the brightness between low and high. Now for some action video of the Larson Scanner in operation:

Well that really was fun, a nice change from the usual things around here.

But wait, there’s more… although the Larson Scanner is a good training kit, it can also function in other interesting ways. The kit is completely open-source, you can download the PCB layout file, circuit schematic and microcontroller code. Get two or more and link them together to make a really wide LED display – expansion instructions are available from here. If you solder in a 6-pin PCB header to the area marked J1 on the PCB, you can reprogram the microcontroller using an STK500-compatible programmer.

After sitting my Larson Scanner next to the computer tower for a few minutes, I had contemplated fitting it into a 5.25″ drive bay to make my own Cylon PC, however that might be a little over the top. However my PC case has some dust filters on the front, which would allow LEDs to shine through in a nicely subdued way. Mounting the Larson Scanner PCB inside the computer case will be simple, and power can be sourced from the computer power supply – 5V is available from a disk drive power lead.

If you are going to modify your PC in a similar fashion, please read my disclaimer under “boring stuff” first.

The Larson Scanner can run on 3.3V without any alteration to the supplied components. What needs to be done is to use a voltage regulator to convert the 5V down to 3.3V. My example has used a 78L33 equivalent, the TI LP2950 as it is in stock. The power comes from a drive power cable splitter as such:

You may have a spare power plug in your machine, so can tap from that. 5V is the red lead, and GND is the adjacent black lead. Don’t use yellow – it is 12V. It is then a simple matter of running 5V from the red lead to pin 1 of the regulator, GND from the Larson Scanner and PC together to pin 2, and 3.3V out from the regulator to the PCB 3.3V. Insulation is important with this kind of work, so use plenty of heatshrink:

… then cover the whole lot up:

Now to locate a free power plug in the machine. It has been a while since opening the machine – time for a dust clean up as well:

Mounting the PCB is a temporary affair until I can find some insulated mounting standoffs:

However it was worth the effort, the following video clip shows the results in action:

So there you have it. The Larson Scanner is an ideal kit for the beginner, lover of blinking LEDs, and anyone else that wants to have some easy blinking fun. You can buy Larson Scanner kits in Australia from Little Bird Electronics, or directly from Evil Mad Science for those elsewhere.

As always, thank you for reading and I look forward to your comments and so on. Furthermore, don’t be shy in pointing out errors or places that could use improvement. Please subscribe using one of the methods at the top-right of this web page to receive updates on new posts, follow me on twitter or facebook, or join our Google Group for further discussion.